New Facebook Video Metrics: all you need to know

In May, Facebook raised their game and showed clear intentions of vying with Youtube for video ad revenue.

In other words, they want you to upload videos onto Facebook instead of sharing videos from Youtube. To encourage that, they’ve recently announced a slew of new video metrics, aimed at providing more information to Facebook marketers like you and I to better manage our video content.

What are the Facebook video metrics?

In the new update, Facebook provided 10 new metrics:

1. Lifetime average time video viewed (Total count)

The average length of video viewed among all the times that your video was viewed. All the video length watched are included, even if the same person watches it more than once.

2. Lifetime organic views up to 95% (Total count)

The number of times that your video was viewed for at least 95% of the entire video duration when your video post was served to them without using Facebook Ads.

3. Lifetime organic views up to 95% (Unique users)

The number of people who viewed your video for at least 95% of the entire video duration when your video post was served to them without using Facebook Ads.

4. Lifetime paid views up to 95% (Total count)

The number of times that your video was viewed for at least 95% of the entire video duration when your video post was served to them using Facebook Ads.

5. Lifetime paid views up to 95% (Unique users)

The number of people who viewed your video for at least 95% of the entire video duration when your video post was served to them using Facebook Ads.

That was the first five and here’s the next five:

6. Lifetime video length (Total count)

I haven’t got a clue whether this means the length of your video, or the total duration of your video that people have watched on Facebook. The problem is because Facebook included “total count” in the metric definition, which makes it confusing.

7. Lifetime organic views (Total count)

Number of times people watched your video for at least 3 seconds when your video post was served to them without using Facebook Ads.

8. Lifetime organic views (Unique users)

Number of people who watched your video for at least 3 seconds when your video post was served to them without using Facebook Ads.

9. Lifetime paid views (Total count)

Number of times people watched your video for at least 3 seconds when your video post was served to them using Facebook Ads.

10. Lifetime paid views (Unique users)

Number of people who watched your video for at least 3 seconds when your video post was served to them without using Facebook Ads.

Which video metrics should you use?

Unless you promote your videos to only your customers, email list, and engaged fans, organic views are likely to perform better than paid views because when you pay to promote your video and reach non-fans, they are less likely to engage than fans.

With this in mind, I recommend you to make the following simple calculations when you look at the performance of your video content:

B. Percentage of paid views up to 95%

This calculation is very similar to the one above so I will not dwell on it.

Use the percentage of organic view up to 95% as a benchmark for your paid efforts. I foresee three common scenarios:

1. Percentage of organic views up to 95% is far ahead of percentage of paid views up to 95%

When this happens, it signals a problem in your targeting strategy.

Your percentage of organic views up to 95% provides evidence of how engaging your video content is. The only difference between organic and paid views is the people who watch the video. Hence, you can attribute the difference to your targeting strategy.

You could start by targeting any of these fans, in no particular order:

o

Existing customers

o

Email subscribers

o

Fans

Then, you can use any of the two foolproof methods recommended by Dennis Yu from Blitzmetrics to find the right target audience on Facebook:

o

Start from a smaller target audience. For example, start with one interest and include related interests systematically to widen the target audience while watching your ad performance

o

Prune your target audience. For example, if you’re serving ads to multiple interests, duplicate that ad and reduce the number of interests in each ad. Continue to test your targeting options with every additional 1,000 impressions, which should ensure statistical significance in your results

2. Both the percentages of organic and paid views up to 95% are similar but low

Similar to how you improve your photo posts, you should perform several tests on your video content to determine what works.

Because Facebook users have a short attention span when they scroll the newsfeed, you should not only ensure that your videos are short and engaging, but the thumbnail should also capture the attention of Facebook users.

3. Both the percentages of organic and paid views up to 95% are similar and high

This is absolutely good news but don’t stop there! Having just a few videos that perform well is great indication that you have hit the sweet spot, but long-term success requires more than just short-term efforts.

Now that you have a good idea of what works for your audience, are you able to adapt these concepts to drive engagement, conversions, and sales?

Having a high percentage of your viewers watch the entire video is an encouraging early sign but it does not guarantee a positive change in your bottom-line. But at least you are ready to take the next step – to build stronger relationships with your target audience and convert them into raving customers.

Jason brings with him 5+ years of experience in running successful ad campaigns for the likes of USCCA, Delta Career Education, and consulted for the marketers behind The Economist and Social Media Marketing World 2016. He also teaches the technical approach to optimizing Facebook ads in his free Facebook group.

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